One of the things I find really interesting about living in Asia is going to the supermarket.
In general there’s two kinds: the ‘local’ and the ‘international’ … and while both are a wonderful places to browse and get a bit of an understanding of the people who go there, I must admit I find the ‘international’ ones especially fascinating – if only for the picture it paints of who the supermarket wants/wishes to shop there.
Without doubt, expats have a privileged life – they earn a great salary, pay a low level of tax, tend to live in nice apartments in nice parts of town, have good jobs – but you know what, even with all that I reckon you’d be hard pressed to find even Jamie ‘mockney’ Oliver happy to spend such an enormous amount of money on this:
OK … OK … for those of you who haven’t got the faintest idea how much almost HK$4,000 is, it’s:
AU $556.02
SG $707.00
US $515.08
UK £337.94
THREE HUNDRED AND THRITY SEVEN QUID ON VINEGAR!!!
VINEGAR.
Fucking vinegar … the sort of stuff you get free down the local takeaway.
Seriously, would that bottle really make your packet of chips taste that much better?
Apparently it’s been brewed [or whatever you call it] for EIGHTY YEARS.
Vinegar. 80 years. Three hundred quid.
Am I the only one who thinks this is all fucking mental?
I know Asia is obsessed with status – driving sales of everything from watches and bags through to cars and apartments – but you know it’s all gone a bit far when someone wants to charge the GDP of Wales for a bottle of bloody vinegar.
What happens if you’ve bought a bottle and have people over for dinner?
You couldn’t enjoy a single second of the evening as you’d be watching your guests with hawks eyes as they pour 5 bucks away every time a little drop touches their food … but you’d have to let them use it or they’d be no point owning the bloody thing given you’d be the sort of person that has no self esteem and instead has to fake it through the aquisition of items that serve no value other than to show other meaningless individuals you have cash.
The World’s gone mad, but not as mad as the person who stocked it or bought it.
BTW – and I know this is going to sound uber-pathetic – does anyone know who was the first person to refer to a market as a ‘supermarket’?
It’s just I’m doing something for a client about marketing ideas/positioning that have now become part of the general landscape, and it appears to me that once-upon-a-time, someone decided to refer to their market as a ‘supermarket’ in a bid to position themselves as being ‘bigger, better & cheaper’ than their competition and yet because they didn’t invest in directly linking that term to their brand, it has now just become a general descriptor for the entire category.
Yes I know, stating the obvious … but I do find it quite interesting to try and isolate the point where specific term/definition lost its ability to relate to the person/brand who dreamt it up.
Right enough of this bollocks, time to go and shove some Sarsons on my chips … it’s only a couple of quid a bottle and tastes fucking lovely.